The fourth festival for new musical theatre, INFEKTION!, moves a phenomenon of the last 30 years into the centre of attention: composers referring to historical music and theatre material and following it up into the present. The Italian Salvatore Sciarrino took a particularly individual and fascinating path. His work is one of the focuses of this year's festival. His musical theatre works »Lohengrin« and »Macbeth« are the starting point for a retrospective comprising concerts and lectures. »Lezioni di tenebra« by Lucia Ronchetti, a composer representing the younger generation of the Italian avant-garde, falls under the same heading. In her work she tackles the baroque opera »Giasone«. And also Helmut Oehring in his »AscheMOND« enters into a dialogue with a colleague long since dead: the 350 years older Englishman Henry Purcell.

Maybe the mutual enrichment of dramatic and musical theatre becomes most clearly visible in the co-operation between Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht in the 1920s and continued in its most radical form in the relationship between Morton Feldman and Samuel Beckett. The performance of »Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny« and »Footfalls | Neither« is an example of what completely different results the encounter of drama and musical theatre can have. INFEKTION! in 2014 offers two weeks of musical theatre breaking down the barriers of time and tradition.